Diary

With Beck as an Avatar – Because Leadership Challenges Hate a Vacuum.

When James Howard Kuntsler gets hammered on Sunday night, it makes for great Monday morning blogging over at ClusterBleepNation.com. This morning he asks us if we would prefer “One Lump or Two?” From this ejection of vomit and venom, I learn that Mr. Kuntsler has a hilariously low opinion of Glenn Beck and his remarkably successful “Restoring Honor” Rally at the Lincoln Memorial. It was nice of Mr. Kuntsler to put the bottom line up front.

Here come the Corn Pone Nazis! Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for a rally dedicated to “restoring honor,” which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that (Expletive deleted) out of the White House!

(HT for the comedy value: James Howard Kuntsler).

Personally, I don’t think Mr. Beck knows sheet from shingle about fixing modern America. He’s a demagogue playing a real man’s game and is in over his head as soon as he leaves the kiddie steps and lets go of his rubber ducky. Similar sentiments could be fairly leveled against Saint Joan of Arc back when things were rotten. She shouldn’t have been charge of an entire French Army either.

Beck took charge because eventually, someone had to report for duty and no one else was willing or able. He’s Bucky “Bleeping” Dent at bat in Fenway Park. This morning, James Howard Kuntsler sounds like a Red Sox fan. Beck may not be my ideal of a leader, but he correctly identified an evil state of affairs and attacked it.

For the better part of the last forty-five years, the bulk of governmental action has been in response to special pleadings. Well-organized special interests roll the majority of the population. They get special deals, special exemptions, and special carve-outs. Average, working Americans pay all the taxes, while the Goldman Sachs, the AIGs and the Senator Kerrys always know which strings to pull and where to park the yachts.

Glenn Beck has figured out that a critical mass of these hard-working Americans is not composed of mindless drones. They get tired of being told to pony-up for others who they don’t exactly see pulling too hard on the oars. When he went to The Lincoln Memorial and cynically co-opted decades’ worth of Civil Rights imagery, he was sending the message that the America that pays for this BS equalitarian fantasy has rights as well. The America that makes America work will not continue to be guilt-tripped into letting charlatan’s use their ass-holes as an ATM without a withdrawal limit.

Brett Stevens of Amerika.org describes the frustrations that Beck has tapped into.

Beck has tapped into the outrage of middle class white America by pointing out the obvious: for the last 40 years we’ve been on a manic quest to take care of every non-majority group — blacks, Asians, gays, Hispanics, potheads, Muslims, polygamists — while doing so at the expense of white suburban middle-class America, which we assume will just keep trucking along and footing the bill.

Now these people are waking up, and people do wake up very slowly, to find America transformed. It’s no longer the happy world of the 1950s. It’s a crime-ridden, third world state with corruption, devalued currency, a crazed Nanny State kicking down doors, constant combat in its cities.

(HT: Brett Stevens)

Sarah Palin began to sense this smoldering anger in 2008, but couldn’t take control of the ticket from the VEEP slot and run on populist rage. Jacksonian America does not want to be used as a mule. They’ll give you the 40 acres, but they’ll be damned if they get thrown in as the mule. They seek and desperately need an avatar for that frustration. They need the spokespeople to join their point of view to the national political conversation.

But they keep on getting slapped down. James Howard Kuntsler, the only man alive who likes Sarah Palin less than Levi Johnson or Andrew Sullivan, gives voice to the “Progressive” hubris below.

Glenn Beck’s sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don’t have enough money yet.

(HT: Kuntsler as previously cited)

What Kuntsler is too arrogant to understand, is that Glenn Back is doing America a favor. He’s not just doing his fans or his career one. Representative Democracy is only meta-stable at best if not all the people are represented. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin stand between his White, Yuppie, Liberal Ass and the pitch-forks. Kuntsler is too busy arguing ad-Hitlerum to figure that out.

In a way, Beck’s choice of venue was condign for reasons beyond that of partisan sniping. Martin Luther King, Jr led a genuinely aggrieved minority to call on the government and receive attention. If you read any of the early speeches by Malcolm X, you know well that we are fortunate that Dr. King finally received a respectful hearing of his people’s grievances.

As the followers of Glenn Beck grow poorer, less secure and more resentful towards those who govern our nation, maybe, just maybe the political leaders who actually represent the likes of James Howard Kuntsler should give some thought to inviting Mr. Beck or Mrs Palin to engage in a more rational conversation.

Somewhere between 87,000 to 300,000 people (depending upon the partisan affiliation of the crowd-counter) came out to cheer for the Corn-Pone Hitlerette. Perhaps the arrogant and dismissive Mr. Kuntsler could end up actually living in the world he wrote about in his dystopic World Made By Hand. That happened to a whole bunch of Russians once when the Boyars were too arrogant to heed the desires of the people in 1917.

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